hours
before, and came out into the great circular hall, no less strange and
mysterious now in the half light of dawn than it had been by firelight.
The room was empty, for it must have been very early, although a fire
already blazed in the fireplace. We sat by the fire some time, seeing no
one. Presently slow footsteps sounded in the stairway, and the old man
entered, silent as the night before, nodding to us civilly, but showing
by no sign any surprise which he may have felt at our early rising. In
absolute silence he moved around, preparing coffee for us; and when at
last the frugal breakfast was ready, and we sat around the rough table
munching coarse bread and sipping the black coffee, he would reply to
our overtures only by monosyllables.

Any attempt at drawing from him some facts as to the history of the
villa was received with a grave and frigid repellence that baffled us;
and we were forced to say _addio_ with our hunger for some explanation
of the events of the night still unsatisfied.

But we saw the temples by sunrise, when the mistlike lambent opals
bathed the bases of the tall columns salmon in the morning light! It was
a rhapsody in the pale and unearthly colors of Puvis de Chavannes
vitalized and made glorious with splendid sunlight; the apotheosis of
mist; a vision never before seen, never to be forgotten. It was so
beautiful that the memory of my ghastly night paled and faded, and it
was Tom who assailed the station-master with questions while we waited
for the train from Agropoli.

Luckily he was more than loquacious, he was voluble under the
ameliorating influence of the money we forced upon him; and this, in few
words, was the story he told us while we sat on the platform smoking,
marvelling at the mists that rose to the east, now veiling, now
revealing the lavender Apennines.

"Is there a story of _La Villa Bianca_?"

"Ah, Signori, certainly; and a story very strange and very terrible. It
was much time ago, a hundred,--two hundred years; I do not know. Well,
the Duca di San Damiano married a lady so fair, so most beautiful that
she was called _La Luna di Pesto_; but she was of the people,--more, she
was of the banditti: her father was of Calabria, and a terror of the
Campagna. But the Duke was young, and he married her, and for her built
the white villa; and it was a wonder throughout Campania,--you have
seen? It is splendid now, even if a ruin. Well, it was less than a year
after they came